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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER X.
The next day he persuaded May to escape for a walk in the Park after luncheon.
As was the custom in old-fashioned Episcopalian New York, she usually
accompanied her parents to church on Sunday afternoons; but Mrs. Welland condoned her
truancy, having that very morning won her
over to the necessity of a long engagement, with time to prepare a hand-embroidered
trousseau containing the proper number of dozens.
The day was delectable.
The bare vaulting of trees along the Mall was ceiled with lapis lazuli, and arched
above snow that shone like splintered crystals.
It was the weather to call out May's radiance, and she burned like a young maple
in the frost.
Archer was proud of the glances turned on her, and the simple joy of possessorship
cleared away his underlying perplexities.
"It's so delicious--waking every morning to smell lilies-of-the-valley in one's room!"
she said. "Yesterday they came late.
I hadn't time in the morning--"
"But your remembering each day to send them makes me love them so much more than if
you'd given a standing order, and they came every morning on the minute, like one's
music-teacher--as I know Gertrude
Lefferts's did, for instance, when she and Lawrence were engaged."
"Ah--they would!" laughed Archer, amused at her keenness.
He looked sideways at her fruit-like cheek and felt rich and secure enough to add:
"When I sent your lilies yesterday afternoon I saw some rather gorgeous yellow
roses and packed them off to Madame Olenska.
Was that right?" "How dear of you!
Anything of that kind delights her.
It's odd she didn't mention it: she lunched with us today, and spoke of Mr. Beaufort's
having sent her wonderful orchids, and cousin Henry van der Luyden a whole hamper
of carnations from Skuytercliff.
She seems so surprised to receive flowers. Don't people send them in Europe?
She thinks it such a pretty custom." "Oh, well, no wonder mine were overshadowed
by Beaufort's," said Archer irritably.
Then he remembered that he had not put a card with the roses, and was vexed at
having spoken of them. He wanted to say: "I called on your cousin
yesterday," but hesitated.
If Madame Olenska had not spoken of his visit it might seem awkward that he should.
Yet not to do so gave the affair an air of mystery that he disliked.
To shake off the question he began to talk of their own plans, their future, and Mrs.
Welland's insistence on a long engagement. "If you call it long!
Isabel Chivers and Reggie were engaged for two years: Grace and Thorley for nearly a
year and a half. Why aren't we very well off as we are?"
It was the traditional maidenly interrogation, and he felt ashamed of
himself for finding it singularly childish.
No doubt she simply echoed what was said for her; but she was nearing her twenty-
second birthday, and he wondered at what age "nice" women began to speak for
themselves.
"Never, if we won't let them, I suppose," he mused, and recalled his mad outburst to
Mr. Sillerton Jackson: "Women ought to be as free as we are--"
It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman's eyes, and
bid her look forth on the world.
But how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended
bandaged to the family vault?
He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and
the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes
because they had no use for them.
What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly
at blankness? "We might be much better off.
We might be altogether together--we might travel."
Her face lit up. "That would be lovely," she owned: she
would love to travel.
But her mother would not understand their wanting to do things so differently.
"As if the mere 'differently' didn't account for it!" the wooer insisted.
"Newland!
You're so original!" she exulted.
His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young men in the
same situation were expected to say, and that she was making the answers that
instinct and tradition taught her to make-- even to the point of calling him original.
"Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls
cut out of the same folded paper.
We're like patterns stencilled on a wall. Can't you and I strike out for ourselves,
May?"
He had stopped and faced her in the excitement of their discussion, and her
eyes rested on him with a bright unclouded admiration.
"Mercy--shall we elope?" she laughed.
"If you would--" "You DO love me, Newland!
I'm so happy." "But then--why not be happier?"
"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?"
"Why not--why not--why not?" She looked a little bored by his
insistence.
She knew very well that they couldn't, but it was troublesome to have to produce a
reason. "I'm not clever enough to argue with you.
But that kind of thing is rather--vulgar, isn't it?" she suggested, relieved to have
hit on a word that would assuredly extinguish the whole subject.
"Are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?"
She was evidently staggered by this. "Of course I should hate it--so would you,"
she rejoined, a trifle irritably.
He stood silent, beating his stick nervously against his boot-top; and feeling
that she had indeed found the right way of closing the discussion, she went on light-
heartedly: "Oh, did I tell you that I showed Ellen my ring?
She thinks it the most beautiful setting she ever saw.
There's nothing like it in the rue de la Paix, she said.
I do love you, Newland, for being so artistic!"
The next afternoon, as Archer, before dinner, sat smoking sullenly in his study,
Janey wandered in on him.
He had failed to stop at his club on the way up from the office where he exercised
the profession of the law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do New Yorkers of
his class.
He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the
same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.
"Sameness--sameness!" he muttered, the word running through his head like a persecuting
tune as he saw the familiar tall-hatted figures lounging behind the plate-glass;
and because he usually dropped in at the club at that hour he had gone home instead.
He knew not only what they were likely to be talking about, but the part each one
would take in the discussion.
The Duke of course would be their principal theme; though the appearance in Fifth
Avenue of a golden-haired lady in a small canary-coloured brougham with a pair of
black cobs (for which Beaufort was
generally thought responsible) would also doubtless be thoroughly gone into.
Such "women" (as they were called) were few in New York, those driving their own
carriages still fewer, and the appearance of Miss *** Ring in Fifth Avenue at the
fashionable hour had profoundly agitated society.
Only the day before, her carriage had passed Mrs. Lovell Mingott's, and the
latter had instantly rung the little bell at her elbow and ordered the coachman to
drive her home.
"What if it had happened to Mrs. van der Luyden?" people asked each other with a
shudder.
Archer could hear Lawrence Lefferts, at that very hour, holding forth on the
disintegration of society.
He raised his head irritably when his sister Janey entered, and then quickly bent
over his book (Swinburne's "Chastelard"-- just out) as if he had not seen her.
She glanced at the writing-table heaped with books, opened a volume of the "Contes
Drolatiques," made a wry face over the archaic French, and sighed: "What learned
things you read!"
"Well--?" he asked, as she hovered Cassandra-like before him.
"Mother's very angry." "Angry?
With whom?
About what?" "Miss Sophy Jackson has just been here.
She brought word that her brother would come in after dinner: she couldn't say very
much, because he forbade her to: he wishes to give all the details himself.
He's with cousin Louisa van der Luyden now."
"For heaven's sake, my dear girl, try a fresh start.
It would take an omniscient Deity to know what you're talking about."
"It's not a time to be profane, Newland.... Mother feels badly enough about your not
going to church..."
With a groan he plunged back into his book. "NEWLAND!
Do listen.
Your friend Madame Olenska was at Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's party last night: she
went there with the Duke and Mr. Beaufort."
At the last clause of this announcement a senseless anger swelled the young man's
breast. To smother it he laughed.
"Well, what of it?
I knew she meant to." Janey paled and her eyes began to project.
"You knew she meant to--and you didn't try to stop her?
To warn her?"
"Stop her? Warn her?"
He laughed again. "I'm not engaged to be married to the
Countess Olenska!"
The words had a fantastic sound in his own ears.
"You're marrying into her family." "Oh, family--family!" he jeered.
"Newland--don't you care about Family?"
"Not a brass farthing." "Nor about what cousin Louisa van der
Luyden will think?" "Not the half of one--if she thinks such
old maid's rubbish."
"Mother is not an old maid," said his *** sister with pinched lips.
He felt like shouting back: "Yes, she is, and so are the van der Luydens, and so we
all are, when it comes to being so much as brushed by the wing-tip of Reality."
But he saw her long gentle face puckering into tears, and felt ashamed of the useless
pain he was inflicting. "Hang Countess Olenska!
Don't be a goose, Janey--I'm not her keeper."
"No; but you DID ask the Wellands to announce your engagement sooner so that we
might all back her up; and if it hadn't been for that cousin Louisa would never
have invited her to the dinner for the Duke."
"Well--what harm was there in inviting her?
She was the best-looking woman in the room; she made the dinner a little less funereal
than the usual van der Luyden banquet." "You know cousin Henry asked her to please
you: he persuaded cousin Louisa.
And now they're so upset that they're going back to Skuytercliff tomorrow.
I think, Newland, you'd better come down. You don't seem to understand how mother
feels."
In the drawing-room Newland found his mother.
She raised a troubled brow from her needlework to ask: "Has Janey told you?"
"Yes."
He tried to keep his tone as measured as her own.
"But I can't take it very seriously." "Not the fact of having offended cousin
Louisa and cousin Henry?"
"The fact that they can be offended by such a trifle as Countess Olenska's going to the
house of a woman they consider common." "Consider--!"
"Well, who is; but who has good music, and amuses people on Sunday evenings, when the
whole of New York is dying of inanition." "Good music?
All I know is, there was a woman who got up on a table and sang the things they sing at
the places you go to in Paris. There was smoking and champagne."
"Well--that kind of thing happens in other places, and the world still goes on."
"I don't suppose, dear, you're really defending the French Sunday?"
"I've heard you often enough, mother, grumble at the English Sunday when we've
been in London." "New York is neither Paris nor London."
"Oh, no, it's not!" her son groaned.
"You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant?
You're right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our ways
when they come among us.
Ellen Olenska especially: she came back to get away from the kind of life people lead
in brilliant societies."
Newland made no answer, and after a moment his mother ventured: "I was going to put
on my bonnet and ask you to take me to see cousin Louisa for a moment before dinner."
He frowned, and she continued: "I thought you might explain to her what you've just
said: that society abroad is different...that people are not as
particular, and that Madame Olenska may not
have realised how we feel about such things.
It would be, you know, dear," she added with an innocent adroitness, "in Madame
Olenska's interest if you did."
"Dearest mother, I really don't see how we're concerned in the matter.
The Duke took Madame Olenska to Mrs. Struthers's--in fact he brought Mrs.
Struthers to call on her.
I was there when they came. If the van der Luydens want to quarrel with
anybody, the real culprit is under their own roof."
"Quarrel?
Newland, did you ever know of cousin Henry's quarrelling?
Besides, the Duke's his guest; and a stranger too.
Strangers don't discriminate: how should they?
Countess Olenska is a New Yorker, and should have respected the feelings of New
York."
"Well, then, if they must have a victim, you have my leave to throw Madame Olenska
to them," cried her son, exasperated.
"I don't see myself--or you either-- offering ourselves up to expiate her
crimes."
"Oh, of course you see only the Mingott side," his mother answered, in the
sensitive tone that was her nearest approach to anger.
The sad butler drew back the drawing-room portieres and announced: "Mr. Henry van der
Luyden." Mrs. Archer dropped her needle and pushed
her chair back with an agitated hand.
"Another lamp," she cried to the retreating servant, while Janey bent over to
straighten her mother's cap.
Mr. van der Luyden's figure loomed on the threshold, and Newland Archer went forward
to greet his cousin. "We were just talking about you, sir," he
said.
Mr. van der Luyden seemed overwhelmed by the announcement.
He drew off his glove to shake hands with the ladies, and smoothed his tall hat
shyly, while Janey pushed an arm-chair forward, and Archer continued: "And the
Countess Olenska."
Mrs. Archer paled. "Ah--a charming woman.
I have just been to see her," said Mr. van der Luyden, complacency restored to his
brow.
He sank into the chair, laid his hat and gloves on the floor beside him in the old-
fashioned way, and went on: "She has a real gift for arranging flowers.
I had sent her a few carnations from Skuytercliff, and I was astonished.
Instead of massing them in big bunches as our head-gardener does, she had scattered
them about loosely, here and there...
I can't say how. The Duke had told me: he said: 'Go and see
how cleverly she's arranged her drawing- room.'
And she has.
I should really like to take Louisa to see her, if the neighbourhood were not so--
unpleasant." A dead silence greeted this unusual flow of
words from Mr. van der Luyden.
Mrs. Archer drew her embroidery out of the basket into which she had nervously tumbled
it, and Newland, leaning against the chimney-place and twisting a humming-bird-
feather screen in his hand, saw Janey's
gaping countenance lit up by the coming of the second lamp.
"The fact is," Mr. van der Luyden continued, stroking his long grey leg with
a bloodless hand weighed down by the Patroon's great signet-ring, "the fact is,
I dropped in to thank her for the very
pretty note she wrote me about my flowers; and also--but this is between ourselves, of
course--to give her a friendly warning about allowing the Duke to carry her off to
parties with him.
I don't know if you've heard--" Mrs. Archer produced an indulgent smile.
"Has the Duke been carrying her off to parties?"
"You know what these English grandees are.
They're all alike.
Louisa and I are very fond of our cousin-- but it's hopeless to expect people who are
accustomed to the European courts to trouble themselves about our little
republican distinctions.
The Duke goes where he's amused." Mr. van der Luyden paused, but no one
spoke. "Yes--it seems he took her with him last
night to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's.
Sillerton Jackson has just been to us with the foolish story, and Louisa was rather
troubled.
So I thought the shortest way was to go straight to Countess Olenska and explain--
by the merest hint, you know--how we feel in New York about certain things.
I felt I might, without indelicacy, because the evening she dined with us she rather
suggested...rather let me see that she would be grateful for guidance.
And she WAS."
Mr. van der Luyden looked about the room with what would have been self-satisfaction
on features less purged of the vulgar passions.
On his face it became a mild benevolence which Mrs. Archer's countenance dutifully
reflected. "How kind you both are, dear Henry--always!
Newland will particularly appreciate what you have done because of dear May and his
new relations." She shot an admonitory glance at her son,
who said: "Immensely, sir.
But I was sure you'd like Madame Olenska." Mr. van der Luyden looked at him with
extreme gentleness. "I never ask to my house, my dear Newland,"
he said, "any one whom I do not like.
And so I have just told Sillerton Jackson." With a glance at the clock he rose and
added: "But Louisa will be waiting. We are dining early, to take the Duke to
the Opera."
After the portieres had solemnly closed behind their visitor a silence fell upon
the Archer family. "Gracious--how romantic!" at last broke
explosively from Janey.
No one knew exactly what inspired her elliptic comments, and her relations had
long since given up trying to interpret them.
Mrs. Archer shook her head with a sigh.
"Provided it all turns out for the best," she said, in the tone of one who knows how
surely it will not.
"Newland, you must stay and see Sillerton Jackson when he comes this evening: I
really shan't know what to say to him." "Poor mother!
But he won't come--" her son laughed, stooping to kiss away her frown.
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XI.
Some two weeks later, Newland Archer, sitting in abstracted idleness in his
private compartment of the office of Letterblair, Lamson and Low, attorneys at
law, was summoned by the head of the firm.
Old Mr. Letterblair, the accredited legal adviser of three generations of New York
gentility, throned behind his mahogany desk in evident perplexity.
As he stroked his closeclipped white whiskers and ran his hand through the
rumpled grey locks above his jutting brows, his disrespectful junior partner thought
how much he looked like the Family
Physician annoyed with a patient whose symptoms refuse to be classified.
"My dear sir--" he always addressed Archer as "sir"--"I have sent for you to go into a
little matter; a matter which, for the moment, I prefer not to mention either to
Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood."
The gentlemen he spoke of were the other senior partners of the firm; for, as was
always the case with legal associations of old standing in New York, all the partners
named on the office letter-head were long
since dead; and Mr. Letterblair, for example, was, professionally speaking, his
own grandson. He leaned back in his chair with a furrowed
brow.
"For family reasons--" he continued. Archer looked up.
"The Mingott family," said Mr. Letterblair with an explanatory smile and bow.
"Mrs. Manson Mingott sent for me yesterday.
Her grand-daughter the Countess Olenska wishes to sue her husband for divorce.
Certain papers have been placed in my hands."
He paused and drummed on his desk.
"In view of your prospective alliance with the family I should like to consult you--to
consider the case with you--before taking any farther steps."
Archer felt the blood in his temples.
He had seen the Countess Olenska only once since his visit to her, and then at the
Opera, in the Mingott box.
During this interval she had become a less vivid and importunate image, receding from
his foreground as May Welland resumed her rightful place in it.
He had not heard her divorce spoken of since Janey's first random allusion to it,
and had dismissed the tale as unfounded gossip.
Theoretically, the idea of divorce was almost as distasteful to him as to his
mother; and he was annoyed that Mr. Letterblair (no doubt prompted by old
Catherine Mingott) should be so evidently planning to draw him into the affair.
After all, there were plenty of Mingott men for such jobs, and as yet he was not even a
Mingott by marriage.
He waited for the senior partner to continue.
Mr. Letterblair unlocked a drawer and drew out a packet.
"If you will run your eye over these papers--"
Archer frowned.
"I beg your pardon, sir; but just because of the prospective relationship, I should
prefer your consulting Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood."
Mr. Letterblair looked surprised and slightly offended.
It was unusual for a junior to reject such an opening.
He bowed.
"I respect your scruple, sir; but in this case I believe true delicacy requires you
to do as I ask. Indeed, the suggestion is not mine but Mrs.
Manson Mingott's and her son's.
I have seen Lovell Mingott; and also Mr. Welland.
They all named you." Archer felt his temper rising.
He had been somewhat languidly drifting with events for the last fortnight, and
letting May's fair looks and radiant nature obliterate the rather importunate pressure
of the Mingott claims.
But this behest of old Mrs. Mingott's roused him to a sense of what the clan
thought they had the right to exact from a prospective son-in-law; and he chafed at
the role.
"Her uncles ought to deal with this," he said.
"They have. The matter has been gone into by the
family.
They are opposed to the Countess's idea; but she is firm, and insists on a legal
opinion." The young man was silent: he had not opened
the packet in his hand.
"Does she want to marry again?" "I believe it is suggested; but she denies
it." "Then--"
"Will you oblige me, Mr. Archer, by first looking through these papers?
Afterward, when we have talked the case over, I will give you my opinion."
Archer withdrew reluctantly with the unwelcome documents.
Since their last meeting he had half- unconsciously collaborated with events in
ridding himself of the burden of Madame Olenska.
His hour alone with her by the firelight had drawn them into a momentary intimacy on
which the Duke of St. Austrey's intrusion with Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, and the
Countess's joyous greeting of them, had rather providentially broken.
Two days later Archer had assisted at the comedy of her reinstatement in the van der
Luydens' favour, and had said to himself, with a touch of tartness, that a lady who
knew how to thank all-powerful elderly
gentlemen to such good purpose for a bunch of flowers did not need either the private
consolations or the public championship of a young man of his small compass.
To look at the matter in this light simplified his own case and surprisingly
furbished up all the dim domestic virtues.
He could not picture May Welland, in whatever conceivable emergency, hawking
about her private difficulties and lavishing her confidences on strange men;
and she had never seemed to him finer or fairer than in the week that followed.
He had even yielded to her wish for a long engagement, since she had found the one
disarming answer to his plea for haste.
"You know, when it comes to the point, your parents have always let you have your way
ever since you were a little girl," he argued; and she had answered, with her
clearest look: "Yes; and that's what makes
it so hard to refuse the very last thing they'll ever ask of me as a little girl."
That was the old New York note; that was the kind of answer he would like always to
be sure of his wife's making.
If one had habitually breathed the New York air there were times when anything less
crystalline seemed stifling.
The papers he had retired to read did not tell him much in fact; but they plunged him
into an atmosphere in which he choked and spluttered.
They consisted mainly of an exchange of letters between Count Olenski's solicitors
and a French legal firm to whom the Countess had applied for the settlement of
her financial situation.
There was also a short letter from the Count to his wife: after reading it,
Newland Archer rose, jammed the papers back into their envelope, and reentered Mr.
Letterblair's office.
"Here are the letters, sir. If you wish, I'll see Madame Olenska," he
said in a constrained voice. "Thank you--thank you, Mr. Archer.
Come and dine with me tonight if you're free, and we'll go into the matter
afterward: in case you wish to call on our client tomorrow."
Newland Archer walked straight home again that afternoon.
It was a winter evening of transparent clearness, with an innocent young moon
above the house-tops; and he wanted to fill his soul's lungs with the pure radiance,
and not exchange a word with any one till
he and Mr. Letterblair were closeted together after dinner.
It was impossible to decide otherwise than he had done: he must see Madame Olenska
himself rather than let her secrets be bared to other eyes.
A great wave of compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience: she stood
before him as an exposed and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs from
farther wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate.
He remembered what she had told him of Mrs. Welland's request to be spared whatever was
"unpleasant" in her history, and winced at the thought that it was perhaps this
attitude of mind which kept the New York air so pure.
"Are we only Pharisees after all?" he wondered, puzzled by the effort to
reconcile his instinctive disgust at human vileness with his equally instinctive pity
for human frailty.
For the first time he perceived how elementary his own principles had always
been.
He passed for a young man who had not been afraid of risks, and he knew that his
secret love-affair with poor silly Mrs. Thorley Rushworth had not been too secret
to invest him with a becoming air of adventure.
But Mrs. Rushworth was "that kind of woman"; foolish, vain, clandestine by
nature, and far more attracted by the secrecy and peril of the affair than by
such charms and qualities as he possessed.
When the fact dawned on him it nearly broke his heart, but now it seemed the redeeming
feature of the case.
The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had
been through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in
the abysmal distinction between the women
one loved and respected and those one enjoyed--and pitied.
In this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly
female relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that when "such things
happened" it was undoubtedly foolish of the
man, but somehow always criminal of the woman.
All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as
necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her
clutches.
The only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to marry a nice girl,
and then trust to her to look after him.
In the complicated old European communities, Archer began to guess, love-
problems might be less simple and less easily classified.
Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations; and
there might even be one in which a woman naturally sensitive and aloof would yet,
from the force of circumstances, from sheer
defencelessness and loneliness, be drawn into a tie inexcusable by conventional
standards.
On reaching home he wrote a line to the Countess Olenska, asking at what hour of
the next day she could receive him, and despatched it by a messenger-boy, who
returned presently with a word to the
effect that she was going to Skuytercliff the next morning to stay over Sunday with
the van der Luydens, but that he would find her alone that evening after dinner.
The note was written on a rather untidy half-sheet, without date or address, but
her hand was firm and free.
He was amused at the idea of her week- ending in the stately solitude of
Skuytercliff, but immediately afterward felt that there, of all places, she would
most feel the chill of minds rigorously averted from the "unpleasant."
He was at Mr. Letterblair's punctually at seven, glad of the pretext for excusing
himself soon after dinner.
He had formed his own opinion from the papers entrusted to him, and did not
especially want to go into the matter with his senior partner.
Mr. Letterblair was a widower, and they dined alone, copiously and slowly, in a
dark shabby room hung with yellowing prints of "The Death of Chatham" and "The
Coronation of Napoleon."
On the sideboard, between fluted Sheraton knife-cases, stood a decanter of Haut
Brion, and another of the old Lanning port (the gift of a client), which the wastrel
Tom Lanning had sold off a year or two
before his mysterious and discreditable death in San Francisco--an incident less
publicly humiliating to the family than the sale of the cellar.
After a velvety oyster soup came shad and cucumbers, then a young broiled turkey with
corn fritters, followed by a canvas-back with currant jelly and a celery mayonnaise.
Mr. Letterblair, who lunched on a sandwich and tea, dined deliberately and deeply, and
insisted on his guest's doing the same.
Finally, when the closing rites had been accomplished, the cloth was removed, cigars
were lit, and Mr. Letterblair, leaning back in his chair and pushing the port westward,
said, spreading his back agreeably to the
coal fire behind him: "The whole family are against a divorce.
And I think rightly." Archer instantly felt himself on the other
side of the argument.
"But why, sir? If there ever was a case--"
"Well--what's the use? SHE'S here--he's there; the Atlantic's
between them.
She'll never get back a dollar more of her money than what he's voluntarily returned
to her: their damned heathen marriage settlements take precious good care of
that.
As things go over there, Olenski's acted generously: he might have turned her out
without a penny." The young man knew this and was silent.
"I understand, though," Mr. Letterblair continued, "that she attaches no importance
to the money. Therefore, as the family say, why not let
well enough alone?"
Archer had gone to the house an hour earlier in full agreement with Mr.
Letterblair's view; but put into words by this selfish, well-fed and supremely
indifferent old man it suddenly became the
Pharisaic voice of a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the
unpleasant. "I think that's for her to decide."
"H'm--have you considered the consequences if she decides for divorce?"
"You mean the threat in her husband's letter?
What weight would that carry?
It's no more than the vague charge of an angry blackguard."
"Yes; but it might make some unpleasant talk if he really defends the suit."
"Unpleasant--!" said Archer explosively.
Mr. Letterblair looked at him from under enquiring eyebrows, and the young man,
aware of the uselessness of trying to explain what was in his mind, bowed
acquiescently while his senior continued: "Divorce is always unpleasant."
"You agree with me?" Mr. Letterblair resumed, after a waiting
silence.
"Naturally," said Archer. "Well, then, I may count on you; the
Mingotts may count on you; to use your influence against the idea?"
Archer hesitated.
"I can't pledge myself till I've seen the Countess Olenska," he said at length.
"Mr. Archer, I don't understand you. Do you want to marry into a family with a
scandalous divorce-suit hanging over it?"
"I don't think that has anything to do with the case."
Mr. Letterblair put down his glass of port and fixed on his young partner a cautious
and apprehensive gaze.
Archer understood that he ran the risk of having his mandate withdrawn, and for some
obscure reason he disliked the prospect.
Now that the job had been thrust on him he did not propose to relinquish it; and, to
guard against the possibility, he saw that he must reassure the unimaginative old man
who was the legal conscience of the Mingotts.
"You may be sure, sir, that I shan't commit myself till I've reported to you; what I
meant was that I'd rather not give an opinion till I've heard what Madame Olenska
has to say."
Mr. Letterblair nodded approvingly at an excess of caution worthy of the best New
York tradition, and the young man, glancing at his watch, pleaded an engagement and
took leave.
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XII.
Old-fashioned New York dined at seven, and the habit of after-dinner calls, though
derided in Archer's set, still generally prevailed.
As the young man strolled up Fifth Avenue from Waverley Place, the long thoroughfare
was deserted but for a group of carriages standing before the Reggie Chiverses'
(where there was a dinner for the Duke),
and the occasional figure of an elderly gentleman in heavy overcoat and muffler
ascending a brownstone doorstep and disappearing into a gas-lit hall.
Thus, as Archer crossed Washington Square, he remarked that old Mr. du Lac was calling
on his cousins the Dagonets, and turning down the corner of West Tenth Street he saw
Mr. Skipworth, of his own firm, obviously bound on a visit to the Miss Lannings.
A little farther up Fifth Avenue, Beaufort appeared on his doorstep, darkly projected
against a blaze of light, descended to his private brougham, and rolled away to a
mysterious and probably unmentionable destination.
It was not an Opera night, and no one was giving a party, so that Beaufort's outing
was undoubtedly of a clandestine nature.
Archer connected it in his mind with a little house beyond Lexington Avenue in
which beribboned window curtains and flower-boxes had recently appeared, and
before whose newly painted door the canary-
coloured brougham of Miss *** Ring was frequently seen to wait.
Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer's world lay the almost
unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians and "people who wrote."
These scattered fragments of humanity had never shown any desire to be amalgamated
with the social structure.
In spite of odd ways they were said to be, for the most part, quite respectable; but
they preferred to keep to themselves.
Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, had inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had
soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.
Others had made the same attempt, and there was a household of Blenkers--an intense and
voluble mother, and three blowsy daughters who imitated her--where one met Edwin Booth
and Patti and William Winter, and the new
Shakespearian actor George Rignold, and some of the magazine editors and musical
and literary critics. Mrs. Archer and her group felt a certain
timidity concerning these persons.
They were odd, they were uncertain, they had things one didn't know about in the
background of their lives and minds.
Literature and art were deeply respected in the Archer set, and Mrs. Archer was always
at pains to tell her children how much more agreeable and cultivated society had been
when it included such figures as Washington
Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck and the poet of "The Culprit Fay."
The most celebrated authors of that generation had been "gentlemen"; perhaps
the unknown persons who succeeded them had gentlemanly sentiments, but their origin,
their appearance, their hair, their
intimacy with the stage and the Opera, made any old New York criterion inapplicable to
them.
"When I was a girl," Mrs. Archer used to say, "we knew everybody between the Battery
and Canal Street; and only the people one knew had carriages.
It was perfectly easy to place any one then; now one can't tell, and I prefer not
to try."
Only old Catherine Mingott, with her absence of moral prejudices and almost
parvenu indifference to the subtler distinctions, might have bridged the abyss;
but she had never opened a book or looked
at a picture, and cared for music only because it reminded her of gala nights at
the Italiens, in the days of her triumph at the Tuileries.
Possibly Beaufort, who was her match in daring, would have succeeded in bringing
about a fusion; but his grand house and silk-stockinged footmen were an obstacle to
informal sociability.
Moreover, he was as illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and considered "fellows who wrote"
as the mere paid purveyors of rich men's pleasures; and no one rich enough to
influence his opinion had ever questioned it.
Newland Archer had been aware of these things ever since he could remember, and
had accepted them as part of the structure of his universe.
He knew that there were societies where painters and poets and novelists and men of
science, and even great actors, were as sought after as Dukes; he had often
pictured to himself what it would have been
to live in the intimacy of drawing-rooms dominated by the talk of Merimee (whose
"Lettres a une Inconnue" was one of his inseparables), of Thackeray, Browning or
William Morris.
But such things were inconceivable in New York, and unsettling to think of.
Archer knew most of the "fellows who wrote," the musicians and the painters: he
met them at the Century, or at the little musical and theatrical clubs that were
beginning to come into existence.
He enjoyed them there, and was bored with them at the Blenkers', where they were
mingled with fervid and dowdy women who passed them about like captured
curiosities; and even after his most
exciting talks with Ned Winsett he always came away with the feeling that if his
world was small, so was theirs, and that the only way to enlarge either was to reach
a stage of manners where they would naturally merge.
He was reminded of this by trying to picture the society in which the Countess
Olenska had lived and suffered, and also-- perhaps--tasted mysterious joys.
He remembered with what amusement she had told him that her grandmother Mingott and
the Wellands objected to her living in a "Bohemian" quarter given over to "people
who wrote."
It was not the peril but the poverty that her family disliked; but that shade escaped
her, and she supposed they considered literature compromising.
She herself had no fears of it, and the books scattered about her drawing-room (a
part of the house in which books were usually supposed to be "out of place"),
though chiefly works of fiction, had
whetted Archer's interest with such new names as those of Paul Bourget, Huysmans,
and the Goncourt brothers.
Ruminating on these things as he approached her door, he was once more conscious of the
curious way in which she reversed his values, and of the need of thinking himself
into conditions incredibly different from
any that he knew if he were to be of use in her present difficulty.
Nastasia opened the door, smiling mysteriously.
On the bench in the hall lay a sable-lined overcoat, a folded opera hat of dull silk
with a gold J. B. on the lining, and a white silk muffler: there was no mistaking
the fact that these costly articles were the property of Julius Beaufort.
Archer was angry: so angry that he came near scribbling a word on his card and
going away; then he remembered that in writing to Madame Olenska he had been kept
by excess of discretion from saying that he wished to see her privately.
He had therefore no one but himself to blame if she had opened her doors to other
visitors; and he entered the drawing-room with the dogged determination to make
Beaufort feel himself in the way, and to outstay him.
The banker stood leaning against the mantelshelf, which was draped with an old
embroidery held in place by brass candelabra containing church candies of
yellowish wax.
He had thrust his chest out, supporting his shoulders against the mantel and resting
his weight on one large patent-leather foot.
As Archer entered he was smiling and looking down on his hostess, who sat on a
sofa placed at right angles to the chimney.
A table banked with flowers formed a screen behind it, and against the orchids and
azaleas which the young man recognised as tributes from the Beaufort hot-houses,
Madame Olenska sat half-reclined, her head
propped on a hand and her wide sleeve leaving the arm bare to the elbow.
It was usual for ladies who received in the evenings to wear what were called "simple
dinner dresses": a close-fitting armour of whale-*** silk, slightly open in the
neck, with lace ruffles filling in the
crack, and tight sleeves with a flounce uncovering just enough wrist to show an
Etruscan gold bracelet or a velvet band.
But Madame Olenska, heedless of tradition, was attired in a long robe of red velvet
bordered about the chin and down the front with glossy black fur.
Archer remembered, on his last visit to Paris, seeing a portrait by the new
painter, Carolus Duran, whose pictures were the sensation of the Salon, in which the
lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes with her chin nestling in fur.
There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in
the evening in a heated drawing-room, and in the combination of a muffled throat and
bare arms; but the effect was undeniably pleasing.
"Lord love us--three whole days at Skuytercliff!"
Beaufort was saying in his loud sneering voice as Archer entered.
"You'd better take all your furs, and a hot-water-bottle."
"Why? Is the house so cold?" she asked, holding out her left hand to Archer in a
way mysteriously suggesting that she expected him to kiss it.
"No; but the missus is," said Beaufort, nodding carelessly to the young man.
"But I thought her so kind. She came herself to invite me.
Granny says I must certainly go."
"Granny would, of course.
And I say it's a shame you're going to miss the little oyster supper I'd planned for
you at Delmonico's next Sunday, with Campanini and Scalchi and a lot of jolly
people."
She looked doubtfully from the banker to Archer.
"Ah--that does tempt me!
Except the other evening at Mrs. Struthers's I've not met a single artist
since I've been here." "What kind of artists?
I know one or two painters, very good fellows, that I could bring to see you if
you'd allow me," said Archer boldly. "Painters?
Are there painters in New York?" asked Beaufort, in a tone implying that there
could be none since he did not buy their pictures; and Madame Olenska said to
Archer, with her grave smile: "That would be charming.
But I was really thinking of dramatic artists, singers, actors, musicians.
My husband's house was always full of them."
She said the words "my husband" as if no sinister associations were connected with
them, and in a tone that seemed almost to sigh over the lost delights of her married
life.
Archer looked at her perplexedly, wondering if it were lightness or dissimulation that
enabled her to touch so easily on the past at the very moment when she was risking her
reputation in order to break with it.
"I do think," she went on, addressing both men, "that the imprevu adds to one's
enjoyment. It's perhaps a mistake to see the same
people every day."
"It's confoundedly dull, anyhow; New York is dying of dullness," Beaufort grumbled.
"And when I try to liven it up for you, you go back on me.
Come--think better of it!
Sunday is your last chance, for Campanini leaves next week for Baltimore and
Philadelphia; and I've a private room, and a Steinway, and they'll sing all night for
me."
"How delicious! May I think it over, and write to you
tomorrow morning?" She spoke amiably, yet with the least hint
of dismissal in her voice.
Beaufort evidently felt it, and being unused to dismissals, stood staring at her
with an obstinate line between his eyes. "Why not now?"
"It's too serious a question to decide at this late hour."
"Do you call it late?" She returned his glance coolly.
"Yes; because I have still to talk business with Mr. Archer for a little while."
"Ah," Beaufort snapped.
There was no appeal from her tone, and with a slight shrug he recovered his composure,
took her hand, which he kissed with a practised air, and calling out from the
threshold: "I say, Newland, if you can
persuade the Countess to stop in town of course you're included in the supper," left
the room with his heavy important step.
For a moment Archer fancied that Mr. Letterblair must have told her of his
coming; but the irrelevance of her next remark made him change his mind.
"You know painters, then?
You live in their milieu?" she asked, her eyes full of interest.
"Oh, not exactly.
I don't know that the arts have a milieu here, any of them; they're more like a very
thinly settled outskirt." "But you care for such things?"
"Immensely.
When I'm in Paris or London I never miss an exhibition.
I try to keep up."
She looked down at the tip of the little satin boot that peeped from her long
draperies. "I used to care immensely too: my life was
full of such things.
But now I want to try not to." "You want to try not to?"
"Yes: I want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody else here."
Archer reddened.
"You'll never be like everybody else," he said.
She raised her straight eyebrows a little. "Ah, don't say that.
If you knew how I hate to be different!"
Her face had grown as sombre as a tragic mask.
She leaned forward, clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him
into remote dark distances.
"I want to get away from it all," she insisted.
He waited a moment and cleared his throat. "I know.
Mr. Letterblair has told me."
"Ah?" "That's the reason I've come.
He asked me to--you see I'm in the firm." She looked slightly surprised, and then her
eyes brightened.
"You mean you can manage it for me? I can talk to you instead of Mr.
Letterblair? Oh, that will be so much easier!"
Her tone touched him, and his confidence grew with his self-satisfaction.
He perceived that she had spoken of business to Beaufort simply to get rid of
him; and to have routed Beaufort was something of a triumph.
"I am here to talk about it," he repeated.
She sat silent, her head still propped by the arm that rested on the back of the
sofa. Her face looked pale and extinguished, as
if dimmed by the rich red of her dress.
She struck Archer, of a sudden, as a pathetic and even pitiful figure.
"Now we're coming to hard facts," he thought, conscious in himself of the same
instinctive recoil that he had so often criticised in his mother and her
contemporaries.
How little practice he had had in dealing with unusual situations!
Their very vocabulary was unfamiliar to him, and seemed to belong to fiction and
the stage.
In face of what was coming he felt as awkward and embarrassed as a boy.
After a pause Madame Olenska broke out with unexpected vehemence: "I want to be free;
I want to wipe out all the past."
"I understand that." Her face warmed.
"Then you'll help me?" "First--" he hesitated--"perhaps I ought to
know a little more."
She seemed surprised. "You know about my husband--my life with
him?" He made a sign of assent.
"Well--then--what more is there?
In this country are such things tolerated? I'm a Protestant--our church does not
forbid divorce in such cases." "Certainly not."
They were both silent again, and Archer felt the spectre of Count Olenski's letter
grimacing hideously between them.
The letter filled only half a page, and was just what he had described it to be in
speaking of it to Mr. Letterblair: the vague charge of an angry blackguard.
But how much truth was behind it?
Only Count Olenski's wife could tell. "I've looked through the papers you gave to
Mr. Letterblair," he said at length. "Well--can there be anything more
abominable?"
"No." She changed her position slightly,
screening her eyes with her lifted hand.
"Of course you know," Archer continued, "that if your husband chooses to fight the
case--as he threatens to--" "Yes--?"
"He can say things--things that might be unpl--might be disagreeable to you: say
them publicly, so that they would get about, and harm you even if--"
"If--?"
"I mean: no matter how unfounded they were."
She paused for a long interval; so long that, not wishing to keep his eyes on her
shaded face, he had time to imprint on his mind the exact shape of her other hand, the
one on her knee, and every detail of the
three rings on her fourth and fifth fingers; among which, he noticed, a wedding
ring did not appear. "What harm could such accusations, even if
he made them publicly, do me here?"
It was on his lips to exclaim: "My poor child--far more harm than anywhere else!"
Instead, he answered, in a voice that sounded in his ears like Mr. Letterblair's:
"New York society is a very small world compared with the one you've lived in.
And it's ruled, in spite of appearances, by a few people with--well, rather old-
fashioned ideas."
She said nothing, and he continued: "Our ideas about marriage and divorce are
particularly old-fashioned. Our legislation favours divorce--our social
customs don't."
"Never?"
"Well--not if the woman, however injured, however irreproachable, has appearances in
the least degree against her, has exposed herself by any unconventional action to--to
offensive insinuations--"
She drooped her head a little lower, and he waited again, intensely hoping for a flash
of indignation, or at least a brief cry of denial.
None came.
A little travelling clock ticked purringly at her elbow, and a log broke in two and
sent up a shower of sparks. The whole hushed and brooding room seemed
to be waiting silently with Archer.
"Yes," she murmured at length, "that's what my family tell me."
He winced a little. "It's not unnatural--"
"OUR family," she corrected herself; and Archer coloured.
"For you'll be my cousin soon," she continued gently.
"I hope so."
"And you take their view?" He stood up at this, wandered across the
room, stared with void eyes at one of the pictures against the old red damask, and
came back irresolutely to her side.
How could he say: "Yes, if what your husband hints is true, or if you've no way
of disproving it?" "Sincerely--" she interjected, as he was
about to speak.
He looked down into the fire. "Sincerely, then--what should you gain that
would compensate for the possibility--the certainty--of a lot of beastly talk?"
"But my freedom--is that nothing?"
It flashed across him at that instant that the charge in the letter was true, and that
she hoped to marry the partner of her guilt.
How was he to tell her that, if she really cherished such a plan, the laws of the
State were inexorably opposed to it?
The mere suspicion that the thought was in her mind made him feel harshly and
impatiently toward her. "But aren't you as free as air as it is?"
he returned.
"Who can touch you? Mr. Letterblair tells me the financial
question has been settled--" "Oh, yes," she said indifferently.
"Well, then: is it worth while to risk what may be infinitely disagreeable and painful?
Think of the newspapers--their vileness! It's all stupid and narrow and unjust--but
one can't make over society."
"No," she acquiesced; and her tone was so faint and desolate that he felt a sudden
remorse for his own hard thoughts.
"The individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is supposed to be
the collective interest: people cling to any convention that keeps the family
together--protects the children, if there
are any," he rambled on, pouring out all the stock phrases that rose to his lips in
his intense desire to cover over the ugly reality which her silence seemed to have
laid bare.
Since she would not or could not say the one word that would have cleared the air,
his wish was not to let her feel that he was trying to probe into her secret.
Better keep on the surface, in the prudent old New York way, than risk uncovering a
wound he could not heal.
"It's my business, you know," he went on, "to help you to see these things as the
people who are fondest of you see them.
The Mingotts, the Wellands, the van der Luydens, all your friends and relations: if
I didn't show you honestly how they judge such questions, it wouldn't be fair of me,
would it?"
He spoke insistently, almost pleading with her in his eagerness to cover up that
yawning silence. She said slowly: "No; it wouldn't be
fair."
The fire had crumbled down to greyness, and one of the lamps made a gurgling appeal for
attention.
Madame Olenska rose, wound it up and returned to the fire, but without resuming
her seat.
Her remaining on her feet seemed to signify that there was nothing more for either of
them to say, and Archer stood up also. "Very well; I will do what you wish," she
said abruptly.
The blood rushed to his forehead; and, taken aback by the suddenness of her
surrender, he caught her two hands awkwardly in his.
"I--I do want to help you," he said.
"You do help me. Good night, my cousin."
He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless.
She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the
faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the
belated eloquence of the inarticulate.
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XIII.
It was a crowded night at Wallack's theatre.
The play was "The Shaughraun," with Dion Boucicault in the title role and Harry
Montague and Ada Dyas as the lovers.
The popularity of the admirable English company was at its height, and the
Shaughraun always packed the house.
In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved; in the stalls and boxes, people
smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and clap-trap situations, and enjoyed the
play as much as the galleries did.
There was one episode, in particular, that held the house from floor to ceiling.
It was that in which Harry Montague, after a sad, almost monosyllabic scene of parting
with Miss Dyas, bade her good-bye, and turned to go.
The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece and looking down into the fire,
wore a gray cashmere dress without fashionable loopings or trimmings, moulded
to her tall figure and flowing in long lines about her feet.
Around her neck was a narrow black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her back.
When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms against the mantel-shelf and bowed
her face in her hands.
On the threshold he paused to look at her; then he stole back, lifted one of the ends
of velvet ribbon, kissed it, and left the room without her hearing him or changing
her attitude.
And on this silent parting the curtain fell.
It was always for the sake of that particular scene that Newland Archer went
to see "The Shaughraun."
He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada Dyas as fine as anything he had ever seen
Croisette and Bressant do in Paris, or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London; in
its reticence, its dumb sorrow, it moved
him more than the most famous histrionic outpourings.
On the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy by reminding
him--he could not have said why--of his leave-taking from Madame Olenska after
their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier.
It would have been as difficult to discover any resemblance between the two situations
as between the appearance of the persons concerned.
Newland Archer could not pretend to anything approaching the young English
actor's romantic good looks, and Miss Dyas was a tall red-haired woman of monumental
build whose pale and pleasantly ugly face
was utterly unlike Ellen Olenska's vivid countenance.
Nor were Archer and Madame Olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken silence;
they were client and lawyer separating after a talk which had given the lawyer the
worst possible impression of the client's case.
Wherein, then, lay the resemblance that made the young man's heart beat with a kind
of retrospective excitement?
It seemed to be in Madame Olenska's mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic and
moving possibilities outside the daily run of experience.
She had hardly ever said a word to him to produce this impression, but it was a part
of her, either a projection of her mysterious and outlandish background or of
something inherently dramatic, passionate and unusual in herself.
Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small
part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen
to them.
This tendency he had felt from the first in Madame Olenska.
The quiet, almost passive young woman struck him as exactly the kind of person to
whom things were bound to happen, no matter how much she shrank from them and went out
of her way to avoid them.
The exciting fact was her having lived in an atmosphere so thick with drama that her
own tendency to provoke it had apparently passed unperceived.
It was precisely the odd absence of surprise in her that gave him the sense of
her having been plucked out of a very maelstrom: the things she took for granted
gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.
Archer had left her with the conviction that Count Olenski's accusation was not
unfounded.
The mysterious person who figured in his wife's past as "the secretary" had probably
not been unrewarded for his share in her escape.
The conditions from which she had fled were intolerable, past speaking of, past
believing: she was young, she was frightened, she was desperate--what more
natural than that she should be grateful to her rescuer?
The pity was that her gratitude put her, in the law's eyes and the world's, on a par
with her abominable husband.
Archer had made her understand this, as he was bound to do; he had also made her
understand that simplehearted kindly New York, on whose larger charity she had
apparently counted, was precisely the place where she could least hope for indulgence.
To have to make this fact plain to her--and to witness her resigned acceptance of it--
had been intolerably painful to him.
He felt himself drawn to her by obscure feelings of jealousy and pity, as if her
dumbly-confessed error had put her at his mercy, humbling yet endearing her.
He was glad it was to him she had revealed her secret, rather than to the cold
scrutiny of Mr. Letterblair, or the embarrassed gaze of her family.
He immediately took it upon himself to assure them both that she had given up her
idea of seeking a divorce, basing her decision on the fact that she had
understood the uselessness of the
proceeding; and with infinite relief they had all turned their eyes from the
"unpleasantness" she had spared them.
"I was sure Newland would manage it," Mrs. Welland had said proudly of her future son-
in-law; and old Mrs. Mingott, who had summoned him for a confidential interview,
had congratulated him on his cleverness, and added impatiently: "Silly goose!
I told her myself what nonsense it was.
Wanting to pass herself off as Ellen Mingott and an old maid, when she has the
luck to be a married woman and a Countess!"
These incidents had made the memory of his last talk with Madame Olenska so vivid to
the young man that as the curtain fell on the parting of the two actors his eyes
filled with tears, and he stood up to leave the theatre.
In doing so, he turned to the side of the house behind him, and saw the lady of whom
he was thinking seated in a box with the Beauforts, Lawrence Lefferts and one or two
other men.
He had not spoken with her alone since their evening together, and had tried to
avoid being with her in company; but now their eyes met, and as Mrs. Beaufort
recognised him at the same time, and made
her languid little gesture of invitation, it was impossible not to go into the box.
Beaufort and Lefferts made way for him, and after a few words with Mrs. Beaufort, who
always preferred to look beautiful and not have to talk, Archer seated himself behind
Madame Olenska.
There was no one else in the box but Mr. Sillerton Jackson, who was telling Mrs.
Beaufort in a confidential undertone about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's last Sunday
reception (where some people reported that there had been dancing).
Under cover of this circumstantial narrative, to which Mrs. Beaufort listened
with her perfect smile, and her head at just the right angle to be seen in profile
from the stalls, Madame Olenska turned and spoke in a low voice.
"Do you think," she asked, glancing toward the stage, "he will send her a bunch of
yellow roses tomorrow morning?"
Archer reddened, and his heart gave a leap of surprise.
He had called only twice on Madame Olenska, and each time he had sent her a box of
yellow roses, and each time without a card.
She had never before made any allusion to the flowers, and he supposed she had never
thought of him as the sender.
Now her sudden recognition of the gift, and her associating it with the tender leave-
taking on the stage, filled him with an agitated pleasure.
"I was thinking of that too--I was going to leave the theatre in order to take the
picture away with me," he said. To his surprise her colour rose,
reluctantly and duskily.
She looked down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass in her smoothly gloved hands,
and said, after a pause: "What do you do while May is away?"
"I stick to my work," he answered, faintly annoyed by the question.
In obedience to a long-established habit, the Wellands had left the previous week for
St. Augustine, where, out of regard for the supposed susceptibility of Mr. Welland's
bronchial tubes, they always spent the latter part of the winter.
Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man, with no opinions but with many habits.
With these habits none might interfere; and one of them demanded that his wife and
daughter should always go with him on his annual journey to the south.
To preserve an unbroken domesticity was essential to his peace of mind; he would
not have known where his hair-brushes were, or how to provide stamps for his letters,
if Mrs. Welland had not been there to tell him.
As all the members of the family adored each other, and as Mr. Welland was the
central object of their idolatry, it never occurred to his wife and May to let him go
to St. Augustine alone; and his sons, who
were both in the law, and could not leave New York during the winter, always joined
him for Easter and travelled back with him. It was impossible for Archer to discuss the
necessity of May's accompanying her father.
The reputation of the Mingotts' family physician was largely based on the attack
of pneumonia which Mr. Welland had never had; and his insistence on St. Augustine
was therefore inflexible.
Originally, it had been intended that May's engagement should not be announced till her
return from Florida, and the fact that it had been made known sooner could not be
expected to alter Mr. Welland's plans.
Archer would have liked to join the travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine
and boating with his betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and conventions.
Little arduous as his professional duties were, he would have been convicted of
frivolity by the whole Mingott clan if he had suggested asking for a holiday in mid-
winter; and he accepted May's departure
with the resignation which he perceived would have to be one of the principal
constituents of married life. He was conscious that Madame Olenska was
looking at him under lowered lids.
"I have done what you wished--what you advised," she said abruptly.
"Ah--I'm glad," he returned, embarrassed by her broaching the subject at such a moment.
"I understand--that you were right," she went on a little breathlessly; "but
sometimes life is difficult...perplexing..."
"I know."
"And I wanted to tell you that I DO feel you were right; and that I'm grateful to
you," she ended, lifting her opera-glass quickly to her eyes as the door of the box
opened and Beaufort's resonant voice broke in on them.
Archer stood up, and left the box and the theatre.
Only the day before he had received a letter from May Welland in which, with
characteristic candour, she had asked him to "be kind to Ellen" in their absence.
"She likes you and admires you so much--and you know, though she doesn't show it, she's
still very lonely and unhappy.
I don't think Granny understands her, or uncle Lovell Mingott either; they really
think she's much worldlier and fonder of society than she is.
And I can quite see that New York must seem dull to her, though the family won't admit
it.
I think she's been used to lots of things we haven't got; wonderful music, and
picture shows, and celebrities--artists and authors and all the clever people you
admire.
Granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and clothes--
but I can see that you're almost the only person in New York who can talk to her
about what she really cares for."
His wise May--how he had loved her for that letter!
But he had not meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not
care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame Olenska's
champion.
He had an idea that she knew how to take care of herself a good deal better than the
ingenuous May imagined.
She had Beaufort at her feet, Mr. van der Luyden hovering above her like a protecting
deity, and any number of candidates (Lawrence Lefferts among them) waiting
their opportunity in the middle distance.
Yet he never saw her, or exchanged a word with her, without feeling that, after all,
May's ingenuousness almost amounted to a gift of divination.
Ellen Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XIV.
As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett, the only one
among what Janey called his "clever people" with whom he cared to probe into things a
little deeper than the average level of club and chop-house banter.
He had caught sight, across the house, of Winsett's shabby round-shouldered back, and
had once noticed his eyes turned toward the Beaufort box.
The two men shook hands, and Winsett proposed a bock at a little German
restaurant around the corner.
Archer, who was not in the mood for the kind of talk they were likely to get there,
declined on the plea that he had work to do at home; and Winsett said: "Oh, well so
have I for that matter, and I'll be the Industrious Apprentice too."
They strolled along together, and presently Winsett said: "Look here, what I'm really
after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box of yours--with the Beauforts,
wasn't she?
The one your friend Lefferts seems so smitten by."
Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed.
What the devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name?
And above all, why did he couple it with Lefferts's?
It was unlike Winsett to manifest such curiosity; but after all, Archer
remembered, he was a journalist. "It's not for an interview, I hope?" he
laughed.
"Well--not for the press; just for myself," Winsett rejoined.
"The fact is she's a neighbour of mine-- *** quarter for such a beauty to settle
in--and she's been awfully kind to my little boy, who fell down her area chasing
his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut.
She rushed in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifully
bandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too dazzled to
ask her name."
A pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart. There was nothing extraordinary in the
tale: any woman would have done as much for a neighbour's child.
But it was just like Ellen, he felt, to have rushed in bareheaded, carrying the boy
in her arms, and to have dazzled poor Mrs. Winsett into forgetting to ask who she was.
"That is the Countess Olenska--a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."
"Whew--a Countess!" whistled Ned Winsett. "Well, I didn't know Countesses were so
neighbourly.
Mingotts ain't." "They would be, if you'd let them."
"Ah, well--" It was their old interminable argument as to the obstinate unwillingness
of the "clever people" to frequent the fashionable, and both men knew that there
was no use in prolonging it.
"I wonder," Winsett broke off, "how a Countess happens to live in our slum?"
"Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any of our little
social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in his own picture of her.
"H'm--been in bigger places, I suppose," the other commented.
"Well, here's my corner."
He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him and musing on his
last words.
Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most interesting
thing about him, and always made Archer wonder why they had allowed him to accept
failure so stolidly at an age when most men are still struggling.
Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never seen them.
The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of journalists and theatrical
people, such as the restaurant where Winsett had proposed to go for a bock.
He had given Archer to understand that his wife was an invalid; which might be true of
the poor lady, or might merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in
evening clothes, or in both.
Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social observances: Archer, who dressed in
the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had
never stopped to consider that cleanliness
and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest budget, regarded Winsett's
attitude as part of the boring "Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people,
who changed their clothes without talking
about it, and were not forever harping on the number of servants one kept, seem so
much simpler and less self-conscious than the others.
Nevertheless, he was always stimulated by Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of
the journalist's lean bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of
his corner and carry him off for a long talk.
Winsett was not a journalist by choice.
He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but
after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which
one hundred and twenty copies were sold,
thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as
per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his
real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job
on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New
England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly
entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young
man who has tried and given up.
His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how
little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their
common fund of intellectual interests and
curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained
within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.
"The fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had once said.
"I'm down and out; nothing to be done about it.
I've got only one ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't be
in my time. But you're free and you're well-off.
Why don't you get into touch?
There's only one way to do it: to go into politics."
Archer threw his head back and laughed.
There one saw at a flash the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the
others--Archer's kind.
Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, "a gentleman couldn't go into
politics."
But, since he could hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively:
"Look at the career of the honest man in American politics!
They don't want us."
"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be
'they' yourselves?" Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a
slightly condescending smile.
It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholy fate of the
few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal or state politics in New
York.
The day was past when that sort of thing was possible: the country was in possession
of the bosses and the emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or
culture.
"Culture! Yes--if we had it!
But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack
of--well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition
that your forebears brought with them.
But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no
audience.
You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a
Gentleman.'
You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get
right down into the muck. That, or emigrate...
God! If I could emigrate..."
Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back to books,
where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting.
Emigrate!
As if a gentleman could abandon his own country!
One could no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into the
muck.
A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained.
But you couldn't make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the New York of
literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it seem more of a
kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be
a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth
Avenue. The next morning Archer scoured the town in
vain for more yellow roses.
In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived that his
doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden
exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life.
Why should he not be, at that moment, on the sands of St. Augustine with May
Welland?
No one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity.
In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr. Letterblair was the head, and
which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates and "conservative"
investments, there were always two or three
young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition, who, for a certain
number of hours of each day, sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or
simply reading the newspapers.
Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an occupation, the crude fact
of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and the law, being a
profession, was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business.
But none of these young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession, or
any earnest desire to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory
was already perceptibly spreading.
It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too.
He had, to be sure, other tastes and interests; he spent his vacations in
European travel, cultivated the "clever people" May spoke of, and generally tried
to "keep up," as he had somewhat wistfully put it to Madame Olenska.
But once he was married, what would become of this narrow margin of life in which his
real experiences were lived?
He had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, though perhaps less
ardently, and who had gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of their
elders.
From the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame Olenska, asking if he might call
that afternoon, and begging her to let him find a reply at his club; but at the club
he found nothing, nor did he receive any letter the following day.
This unexpected silence mortified him beyond reason, and though the next morning
he saw a glorious cluster of yellow roses behind a florist's window-pane, he left it
there.
It was only on the third morning that he received a line by post from the Countess
Olenska.
To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff, whither the van der Luydens
had promptly retreated after putting the Duke on board his steamer.
"I ran away," the writer began abruptly (without the usual preliminaries), "the day
after I saw you at the play, and these kind friends have taken me in.
I wanted to be quiet, and think things over.
You were right in telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safe here.
I wish that you were with us."
She ended with a conventional "Yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the
date of her return. The tone of the note surprised the young
man.
What was Madame Olenska running away from, and why did she feel the need to be safe?
His first thought was of some dark menace from abroad; then he reflected that he did
not know her epistolary style, and that it might run to picturesque exaggeration.
Women always exaggerated; and moreover she was not wholly at her ease in English,
which she often spoke as if she were translating from the French.
"Je me suis evadee--" put in that way, the opening sentence immediately suggested that
she might merely have wanted to escape from a boring round of engagements; which was
very likely true, for he judged her to be
capricious, and easily wearied of the pleasure of the moment.
It amused him to think of the van der Luydens' having carried her off to
Skuytercliff on a second visit, and this time for an indefinite period.
The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened to visitors, and a chilly
week-end was the most ever offered to the few thus privileged.
But Archer had seen, on his last visit to Paris, the delicious play of Labiche, "Le
Voyage de M. Perrichon," and he remembered M. Perrichon's dogged and undiscouraged
attachment to the young man whom he had pulled out of the glacier.
The van der Luydens had rescued Madame Olenska from a doom almost as icy; and
though there were many other reasons for being attracted to her, Archer knew that
beneath them all lay the gentle and
obstinate determination to go on rescuing her.
He felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away; and almost
immediately remembered that, only the day before, he had refused an invitation to
spend the following Sunday with the Reggie
Chiverses at their house on the Hudson, a few miles below Skuytercliff.
He had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at Highbank, with
coasting, ice-boating, sleighing, long tramps in the snow, and a general flavour
of mild flirting and milder practical jokes.
He had just received a box of new books from his London book-seller, and had
preferred the prospect of a quiet Sunday at home with his spoils.
But he now went into the club writing-room, wrote a hurried telegram, and told the
servant to send it immediately.
He knew that Mrs. Reggie didn't object to her visitors' suddenly changing their
minds, and that there was always a room to spare in her elastic house.
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XV.
Newland Archer arrived at the Chiverses' on Friday evening, and on Saturday went
conscientiously through all the rites appertaining to a week-end at Highbank.
In the morning he had a spin in the ice- boat with his hostess and a few of the
hardier guests; in the afternoon he "went over the farm" with Reggie, and listened,
in the elaborately appointed stables, to
long and impressive disquisitions on the horse; after tea he talked in a corner of
the firelit hall with a young lady who had professed herself broken-hearted when his
engagement was announced, but was now eager
to tell him of her own matrimonial hopes; and finally, about midnight, he assisted in
putting a gold-fish in one visitor's bed, dressed up a burglar in the bath-room of a
nervous aunt, and saw in the small hours by
joining in a pillow-fight that ranged from the nurseries to the basement.
But on Sunday after luncheon he borrowed a cutter, and drove over to Skuytercliff.
People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa.
Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had.
The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the
"grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa
Dagonet.
It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale
green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows.
From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades
and urns descended in the steel-engraving style to a small irregular lake with an
asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers.
To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees (each
of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate
cast-iron ornaments; and below, in a
hollow, lay the four-roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the
land granted him in 1612.
Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed
up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed
had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front.
Now, as Archer rang the bell, the long *** seemed to echo through a mausoleum;
and the surprise of the butler who at length responded to the call was as great
as though he had been summoned from his final sleep.
Happily Archer was of the family, and therefore, irregular though his arrival
was, entitled to be informed that the Countess Olenska was out, having driven to
afternoon service with Mrs. van der Luyden exactly three quarters of an hour earlier.
"Mr. van der Luyden," the butler continued, "is in, sir; but my impression is that he
is either finishing his nap or else reading yesterday's Evening Post.
I heard him say, sir, on his return from church this morning, that he intended to
look through the Evening Post after luncheon; if you like, sir, I might go to
the library door and listen--"
But Archer, thanking him, said that he would go and meet the ladies; and the
butler, obviously relieved, closed the door on him majestically.
A groom took the cutter to the stables, and Archer struck through the park to the high-
road.
The village of Skuytercliff was only a mile and a half away, but he knew that Mrs. van
der Luyden never walked, and that he must keep to the road to meet the carriage.
Presently, however, coming down a foot-path that crossed the highway, he caught sight
of a slight figure in a red cloak, with a big dog running ahead.
He hurried forward, and Madame Olenska stopped short with a smile of welcome.
"Ah, you've come!" she said, and drew her hand from her ***.
The red cloak made her look gay and vivid, like the Ellen Mingott of old days; and he
laughed as he took her hand, and answered: "I came to see what you were running away
from."
Her face clouded over, but she answered: "Ah, well--you will see, presently."
The answer puzzled him. "Why--do you mean that you've been
overtaken?"
She shrugged her shoulders, with a little movement like Nastasia's, and rejoined in a
lighter tone: "Shall we walk on? I'm so cold after the sermon.
And what does it matter, now you're here to protect me?"
The blood rose to his temples and he caught a fold of her cloak.
"Ellen--what is it?
You must tell me."
"Oh, presently--let's run a race first: my feet are freezing to the ground," she
cried; and gathering up the cloak she fled away across the snow, the dog leaping about
her with challenging barks.
For a moment Archer stood watching, his gaze delighted by the flash of the red
meteor against the snow; then he started after her, and they met, panting and
laughing, at a wicket that led into the park.
She looked up at him and smiled. "I knew you'd come!"
"That shows you wanted me to," he returned, with a disproportionate joy in their
nonsense.
The white glitter of the trees filled the air with its own mysterious brightness, and
as they walked on over the snow the ground seemed to sing under their feet.
"Where did you come from?"
Madame Olenska asked. He told her, and added: "It was because I
got your note."
After a pause she said, with a just perceptible chill in her voice: "May asked
you to take care of me." "I didn't need any asking."
"You mean--I'm so evidently helpless and defenceless?
What a poor thing you must all think me!
But women here seem not--seem never to feel the need: any more than the blessed in
heaven." He lowered his voice to ask: "What sort of
a need?"
"Ah, don't ask me! I don't speak your language," she retorted
petulantly.
The answer smote him like a blow, and he stood still in the path, looking down at
her. "What did I come for, if I don't speak
yours?"
"Oh, my friend--!" She laid her hand lightly on his arm, and
he pleaded earnestly: "Ellen--why won't you tell me what's happened?"
She shrugged again.
"Does anything ever happen in heaven?" He was silent, and they walked on a few
yards without exchanging a word. Finally she said: "I will tell you--but
where, where, where?
One can't be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with all the
doors wide open, and always a servant bringing tea, or a log for the fire, or the
newspaper!
Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?
You're so shy, and yet you're so public.
I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage, before a dreadfully
polite audience that never applauds." "Ah, you don't like us!"
Archer exclaimed.
They were walking past the house of the old Patroon, with its squat walls and small
square windows compactly grouped about a central chimney.
The shutters stood wide, and through one of the newly-washed windows Archer caught the
light of a fire. "Why--the house is open!" he said.
She stood still.
"No; only for today, at least. I wanted to see it, and Mr. van der Luyden
had the fire lit and the windows opened, so that we might stop there on the way back
from church this morning."
She ran up the steps and tried the door. "It's still unlocked--what luck!
Come in and we can have a quiet talk.
Mrs. van der Luyden has driven over to see her old aunts at Rhinebeck and we shan't be
missed at the house for another hour." He followed her into the narrow passage.
His spirits, which had dropped at her last words, rose with an irrational leap.
The homely little house stood there, its panels and brasses shining in the
firelight, as if magically created to receive them.
A big bed of embers still gleamed in the kitchen chimney, under an iron pot hung
from an ancient crane.
Rush-bottomed arm-chairs faced each other across the tiled hearth, and rows of Delft
plates stood on shelves against the walls. Archer stooped over and threw a log upon
the embers.
Madame Olenska, dropping her cloak, sat down in one of the chairs.
Archer leaned against the chimney and looked at her.
"You're laughing now; but when you wrote me you were unhappy," he said.
"Yes." She paused.
"But I can't feel unhappy when you're here."
"I sha'n't be here long," he rejoined, his lips stiffening with the effort to say just
so much and no more.
"No; I know. But I'm improvident: I live in the moment
when I'm happy."
The words stole through him like a temptation, and to close his senses to it
he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black tree-boles against
the snow.
But it was as if she too had shifted her place, and he still saw her, between
himself and the trees, drooping over the fire with her indolent smile.
Archer's heart was beating insubordinately.
What if it were from him that she had been running away, and if she had waited to tell
him so till they were here alone together in this secret room?
"Ellen, if I'm really a help to you--if you really wanted me to come--tell me what's
wrong, tell me what it is you're running away from," he insisted.
He spoke without shifting his position, without even turning to look at her: if the
thing was to happen, it was to happen in this way, with the whole width of the room
between them, and his eyes still fixed on the outer snow.
For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment Archer imagined her, almost
heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light arms about his neck.
While he waited, soul and body throbbing with the miracle to come, his eyes
mechanically received the image of a heavily-coated man with his fur collar
turned up who was advancing along the path to the house.
The man was Julius Beaufort. "Ah--!"
Archer cried, bursting into a laugh.
Madame Olenska had sprung up and moved to his side, slipping her hand into his; but
after a glance through the window her face paled and she shrank back.
"So that was it?"
Archer said derisively. "I didn't know he was here," Madame Olenska
murmured.
Her hand still clung to Archer's; but he drew away from her, and walking out into
the passage threw open the door of the house.
"Hallo, Beaufort--this way!
Madame Olenska was expecting you," he said. During his journey back to New York the
next morning, Archer relived with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at
Skuytercliff.
Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska, had, as usual,
carried off the situation high-handedly.
His way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them, if
they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of nonexistence.
Archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was aware of this odd sense of
disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his vanity it gave him the ghostly
advantage of observing unobserved.
Beaufort had entered the little house with his usual easy assurance; but he could not
smile away the vertical line between his eyes.
It was fairly clear that Madame Olenska had not known that he was coming, though her
words to Archer had hinted at the possibility; at any rate, she had evidently
not told him where she was going when she
left New York, and her unexplained departure had exasperated him.
The ostensible reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very night before, of a
"perfect little house," not in the market, which was really just the thing for her,
but would be snapped up instantly if she
didn't take it; and he was loud in mock- reproaches for the dance she had led him in
running away just as he had found it.
"If only this new dodge for talking along a wire had been a little bit nearer
perfection I might have told you all this from town, and been toasting my toes before
the club fire at this minute, instead of
tramping after you through the snow," he grumbled, disguising a real irritation
under the pretence of it; and at this opening Madame Olenska twisted the talk
away to the fantastic possibility that they
might one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or even--
incredible dream!--from one town to another.
This struck from all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such
platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking
against time, and dealing with a new
invention in which it would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of
the telephone carried them safely back to the big house.
Mrs. van der Luyden had not yet returned; and Archer took his leave and walked off to
fetch the cutter, while Beaufort followed the Countess Olenska indoors.
It was probable that, little as the van der Luydens encouraged unannounced visits, he
could count on being asked to dine, and sent back to the station to catch the nine
o'clock train; but more than that he would
certainly not get, for it would be inconceivable to his hosts that a gentleman
travelling without luggage should wish to spend the night, and distasteful to them to
propose it to a person with whom they were
on terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.
Beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it; and his taking the long
journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience.
He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had only one
object in view in his pursuit of pretty women.
His dull and childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more
permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in his own set.
This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly flying: the question was
whether she had fled because his importunities displeased her, or because
she did not wholly trust herself to resist
them; unless, indeed, all her talk of flight had been a blind, and her departure
no more than a manoeuvre. Archer did not really believe this.
Little as he had actually seen of Madame Olenska, he was beginning to think that he
could read her face, and if not her face, her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance,
and even dismay, at Beaufort's sudden appearance.
But, after all, if this were the case, was it not worse than if she had left New York
for the express purpose of meeting him?
If she had done that, she ceased to be an object of interest, she threw in her lot
with the vulgarest of dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with Beaufort
"classed" herself irretrievably.
No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging Beaufort, and probably despising
him, she was yet drawn to him by all that gave him an advantage over the other men
about her: his habit of two continents and
two societies, his familiar association with artists and actors and people
generally in the world's eye, and his careless contempt for local prejudices.
Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of
his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many
men, morally and socially his betters,
whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park.
How should any one coming from a wider world not feel the difference and be
attracted by it?
Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to Archer that he and she did not
talk the same language; and the young man knew that in some respects this was true.
But Beaufort understood every turn of her dialect, and spoke it fluently: his view of
life, his tone, his attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in
Count Olenski's letter.
This might seem to be to his disadvantage with Count Olenski's wife; but Archer was
too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil
from everything that reminded her of her past.
She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it
would still charm her, even though it were against her will.
Thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man make out the case for Beaufort,
and for Beaufort's victim.
A longing to enlighten her was strong in him; and there were moments when he
imagined that all she asked was to be enlightened.
That evening he unpacked his books from London.
The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of
Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant tales,
and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to
which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews.
He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast; but though he turned
the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was
reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand.
Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered
because the name had attracted him: "The House of Life."
He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever
breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new
and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.
All through the night he pursued through those enchanted pages the vision of a woman
who had the face of Ellen Olenska; but when he woke the next morning, and looked out at
the brownstone houses across the street,
and thought of his desk in Mr. Letterblair's office, and the family pew in
Grace Church, his hour in the park of Skuytercliff became as far outside the pale
of probability as the visions of the night.
"Mercy, how pale you look, Newland!"
Janey commented over the coffee-cups at breakfast; and his mother added: "Newland,
dear, I've noticed lately that you've been coughing; I do hope you're not letting
yourself be overworked?"
For it was the conviction of both ladies that, under the iron despotism of his
senior partners, the young man's life was spent in the most exhausting professional
labours--and he had never thought it necessary to undeceive them.
The next two or three days dragged by heavily.
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he
felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
He heard nothing of the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and though
he met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the whist-
tables.
It was not till the fourth evening that he found a note awaiting him on his return
home. "Come late tomorrow: I must explain to you.
Ellen."
These were the only words it contained. The young man, who was dining out, thrust
the note into his pocket, smiling a little at the Frenchness of the "to you."
After dinner he went to a play; and it was not until his return home, after midnight,
that he drew Madame Olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a number of
times.
There were several ways of answering it, and he gave considerable thought to each
one during the watches of an agitated night.
That on which, when morning came, he finally decided was to pitch some clothes
into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was leaving that very afternoon for
St. Augustine.
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XVI.
When Archer walked down the sandy main street of St. Augustine to the house which
had been pointed out to him as Mr. Welland's, and saw May Welland standing
under a magnolia with the sun in her hair,
he wondered why he had waited so long to come.
Here was the truth, here was reality, here was the life that belonged to him; and he,
who fancied himself so scornful of arbitrary restraints, had been afraid to
break away from his desk because of what
people might think of his stealing a holiday!
Her first exclamation was: "Newland--has anything happened?" and it occurred to him
that it would have been more "feminine" if she had instantly read in his eyes why he
had come.
But when he answered: "Yes--I found I had to see you," her happy blushes took the
chill from her surprise, and he saw how easily he would be forgiven, and how soon
even Mr. Letterblair's mild disapproval would be smiled away by a tolerant family.
Early as it was, the main street was no place for any but formal greetings, and
Archer longed to be alone with May, and to pour out all his tenderness and his
impatience.
It still lacked an hour to the late Welland breakfast-time, and instead of asking him
to come in she proposed that they should walk out to an old orange-garden beyond the
town.
She had just been for a row on the river, and the sun that netted the little waves
with gold seemed to have caught her in its meshes.
Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered like silver wire; and
her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity.
As she walked beside Archer with her long swinging gait her face wore the vacant
serenity of a young marble athlete.
To Archer's strained nerves the vision was as soothing as the sight of the blue sky
and the lazy river.
They sat down on a bench under the orange- trees and he put his arm about her and
kissed her.
It was like drinking at a cold spring with the sun on it; but his pressure may have
been more vehement than he had intended, for the blood rose to her face and she drew
back as if he had startled her.
"What is it?" he asked, smiling; and she looked at him with surprise, and answered:
"Nothing." A slight embarrassment fell on them, and
her hand slipped out of his.
It was the only time that he had kissed her on the lips except for their fugitive
embrace in the Beaufort conservatory, and he saw that she was disturbed, and shaken
out of her cool boyish composure.
"Tell me what you do all day," he said, crossing his arms under his tilted-back
head, and pushing his hat forward to screen the sun-dazzle.
To let her talk about familiar and simple things was the easiest way of carrying on
his own independent train of thought; and he sat listening to her simple chronicle of
swimming, sailing and riding, varied by an
occasional dance at the primitive inn when a man-of-war came in.
A few pleasant people from Philadelphia and Baltimore were picknicking at the inn, and
the Selfridge Merrys had come down for three weeks because Kate Merry had had
bronchitis.
They were planning to lay out a lawn tennis court on the sands; but no one but Kate and
May had racquets, and most of the people had not even heard of the game.
All this kept her very busy, and she had not had time to do more than look at the
little vellum book that Archer had sent her the week before (the "Sonnets from the
Portuguese"); but she was learning by heart
"How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," because it was one of the first
things he had ever read to her; and it amused her to be able to tell him that Kate
Merry had never even heard of a poet called Robert Browning.
Presently she started up, exclaiming that they would be late for breakfast; and they
hurried back to the tumble-down house with its pointless porch and unpruned hedge of
plumbago and pink geraniums where the Wellands were installed for the winter.
Mr. Welland's sensitive domesticity shrank from the discomforts of the slovenly
southern hotel, and at immense expense, and in face of almost insuperable difficulties,
Mrs. Welland was obliged, year after year,
to improvise an establishment partly made up of discontented New York servants and
partly drawn from the local African supply.
"The doctors want my husband to feel that he is in his own home; otherwise he would
be so wretched that the climate would not do him any good," she explained, winter
after winter, to the sympathising
Philadelphians and Baltimoreans; and Mr. Welland, beaming across a breakfast table
miraculously supplied with the most varied delicacies, was presently saying to Archer:
"You see, my dear fellow, we camp--we literally camp.
I tell my wife and May that I want to teach them how to rough it."
Mr. and Mrs. Welland had been as much surprised as their daughter by the young
man's sudden arrival; but it had occurred to him to explain that he had felt himself
on the verge of a nasty cold, and this
seemed to Mr. Welland an all-sufficient reason for abandoning any duty.
"You can't be too careful, especially toward spring," he said, heaping his plate
with straw-coloured griddle-cakes and drowning them in golden syrup.
"If I'd only been as prudent at your age May would have been dancing at the
Assemblies now, instead of spending her winters in a wilderness with an old
invalid."
"Oh, but I love it here, Papa; you know I do.
If only Newland could stay I should like it a thousand times better than New York."
"Newland must stay till he has quite thrown off his cold," said Mrs. Welland
indulgently; and the young man laughed, and said he supposed there was such a thing as
one's profession.
He managed, however, after an exchange of telegrams with the firm, to make his cold
last a week; and it shed an ironic light on the situation to know that Mr.
Letterblair's indulgence was partly due to
the satisfactory way in which his brilliant young junior partner had settled the
troublesome matter of the Olenski divorce.
Mr. Letterblair had let Mrs. Welland know that Mr. Archer had "rendered an invaluable
service" to the whole family, and that old Mrs. Manson Mingott had been particularly
pleased; and one day when May had gone for
a drive with her father in the only vehicle the place produced Mrs. Welland took
occasion to touch on a topic which she always avoided in her daughter's presence.
"I'm afraid Ellen's ideas are not at all like ours.
She was barely eighteen when Medora Manson took her back to Europe--you remember the
excitement when she appeared in black at her coming-out ball?
Another of Medora's fads--really this time it was almost prophetic!
That must have been at least twelve years ago; and since then Ellen has never been to
America.
No wonder she is completely Europeanised." "But European society is not given to
divorce: Countess Olenska thought she would be conforming to American ideas in asking
for her freedom."
It was the first time that the young man had pronounced her name since he had left
Skuytercliff, and he felt the colour rise to his cheek.
Mrs. Welland smiled compassionately.
"That is just like the extraordinary things that foreigners invent about us.
They think we dine at two o'clock and countenance divorce!
That is why it seems to me so foolish to entertain them when they come to New York.
They accept our hospitality, and then they go home and repeat the same stupid
stories."
Archer made no comment on this, and Mrs. Welland continued: "But we do most
thoroughly appreciate your persuading Ellen to give up the idea.
Her grandmother and her uncle Lovell could do nothing with her; both of them have
written that her changing her mind was entirely due to your influence--in fact she
said so to her grandmother.
She has an unbounded admiration for you. Poor Ellen--she was always a wayward child.
I wonder what her fate will be?" "What we've all contrived to make it," he
felt like answering.
"If you'd all of you rather she should be Beaufort's mistress than some decent
fellow's wife you've certainly gone the right way about it."
He wondered what Mrs. Welland would have said if he had uttered the words instead of
merely thinking them.
He could picture the sudden decomposure of her firm placid features, to which a
lifelong mastery over trifles had given an air of factitious authority.
Traces still lingered on them of a fresh beauty like her daughter's; and he asked
himself if May's face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of
invincible innocence.
Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals
the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!
"I verily believe," Mrs. Welland continued, "that if the horrible business had come out
in the newspapers it would have been my husband's death-blow.
I don't know any of the details; I only ask not to, as I told poor Ellen when she tried
to talk to me about it. Having an invalid to care for, I have to
keep my mind bright and happy.
But Mr. Welland was terribly upset; he had a slight temperature every morning while we
were waiting to hear what had been decided.
It was the horror of his girl's learning that such things were possible--but of
course, dear Newland, you felt that too. We all knew that you were thinking of May."
"I'm always thinking of May," the young man rejoined, rising to cut short the
conversation.
He had meant to seize the opportunity of his private talk with Mrs. Welland to urge
her to advance the date of his marriage.
But he could think of no arguments that would move her, and with a sense of relief
he saw Mr. Welland and May driving up to the door.
His only hope was to plead again with May, and on the day before his departure he
walked with her to the ruinous garden of the Spanish Mission.
The background lent itself to allusions to European scenes; and May, who was looking
her loveliest under a wide-brimmed hat that cast a shadow of mystery over her too-clear
eyes, kindled into eagerness as he spoke of Granada and the Alhambra.
"We might be seeing it all this spring-- even the Easter ceremonies at Seville," he
urged, exaggerating his demands in the hope of a larger concession.
"Easter in Seville?
And it will be Lent next week!" she laughed.
"Why shouldn't we be married in Lent?" he rejoined; but she looked so shocked that he
saw his mistake.
"Of course I didn't mean that, dearest; but soon after Easter--so that we could sail at
the end of April. I know I could arrange it at the office."
She smiled dreamily upon the possibility; but he perceived that to dream of it
sufficed her.
It was like hearing him read aloud out of his poetry books the beautiful things that
could not possibly happen in real life. "Oh, do go on, Newland; I do love your
descriptions."
"But why should they be only descriptions? Why shouldn't we make them real?"
"We shall, dearest, of course; next year." Her voice lingered over it.
"Don't you want them to be real sooner?
Can't I persuade you to break away now?" She bowed her head, vanishing from him
under her conniving hat-brim. "Why should we dream away another year?
Look at me, dear!
Don't you understand how I want you for my wife?"
For a moment she remained motionless; then she raised on him eyes of such despairing
dearness that he half-released her waist from his hold.
But suddenly her look changed and deepened inscrutably.
"I'm not sure if I DO understand," she said.
"Is it--is it because you're not certain of continuing to care for me?"
Archer sprang up from his seat. "My God--perhaps--I don't know," he broke
out angrily.
May Welland rose also; as they faced each other she seemed to grow in womanly stature
and dignity.
Both were silent for a moment, as if dismayed by the unforeseen trend of their
words: then she said in a low voice: "If that is it--is there some one else?"
"Some one else--between you and me?"
He echoed her words slowly, as though they were only half-intelligible and he wanted
time to repeat the question to himself.
She seemed to catch the uncertainty of his voice, for she went on in a deepening tone:
"Let us talk frankly, Newland.
Sometimes I've felt a difference in you; especially since our engagement has been
announced." "Dear--what madness!" he recovered himself
to exclaim.
She met his protest with a faint smile. "If it is, it won't hurt us to talk about
it."
She paused, and added, lifting her head with one of her noble movements: "Or even
if it's true: why shouldn't we speak of it? You might so easily have made a mistake."
He lowered his head, staring at the black leaf-pattern on the sunny path at their
feet.
"Mistakes are always easy to make; but if I had made one of the kind you suggest, is it
likely that I should be imploring you to hasten our marriage?"
She looked downward too, disturbing the pattern with the point of her sunshade
while she struggled for expression. "Yes," she said at length.
"You might want--once for all--to settle the question: it's one way."
Her quiet lucidity startled him, but did not mislead him into thinking her
insensible.
Under her hat-brim he saw the pallor of her profile, and a slight tremor of the nostril
above her resolutely steadied lips.
"Well--?" he questioned, sitting down on the bench, and looking up at her with a
frown that he tried to make playful.
She dropped back into her seat and went on: "You mustn't think that a girl knows as
little as her parents imagine. One hears and one notices--one has one's
feelings and ideas.
And of course, long before you told me that you cared for me, I'd known that there was
some one else you were interested in; every one was talking about it two years ago at
Newport.
And once I saw you sitting together on the verandah at a dance--and when she came back
into the house her face was sad, and I felt sorry for her; I remembered it afterward,
when we were engaged."
Her voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and she sat clasping and unclasping her hands
about the handle of her sunshade.
The young man laid his upon them with a gentle pressure; his heart dilated with an
inexpressible relief. "My dear child--was THAT it?
If you only knew the truth!"
She raised her head quickly. "Then there is a truth I don't know?"
He kept his hand over hers. "I meant, the truth about the old story you
speak of."
"But that's what I want to know, Newland-- what I ought to know.
I couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong--an unfairness--to somebody else.
And I want to believe that it would be the same with you.
What sort of a life could we build on such foundations?"
Her face had taken on a look of such tragic courage that he felt like bowing himself
down at her feet. "I've wanted to say this for a long time,"
she went on.
"I've wanted to tell you that, when two people really love each other, I understand
that there may be situations which make it right that they should--should go against
public opinion.
And if you feel yourself in any way pledged...pledged to the person we've
spoken of...and if there is any way...any way in which you can fulfill your
pledge...even by her getting a divorce...
Newland, don't give her up because of me!"
His surprise at discovering that her fears had fastened upon an episode so remote and
so completely of the past as his love- affair with Mrs. Thorley Rushworth gave way
to wonder at the generosity of her view.
There was something superhuman in an attitude so recklessly unorthodox, and if
other problems had not pressed on him he would have been lost in wonder at the
prodigy of the Wellands' daughter urging him to marry his former mistress.
But he was still dizzy with the glimpse of the precipice they had skirted, and full of
a new awe at the mystery of young-girlhood.
For a moment he could not speak; then he said: "There is no pledge--no obligation
whatever--of the kind you think. Such cases don't always--present themselves
quite as simply as...
But that's no matter... I love your generosity, because I feel as
you do about those things...
I feel that each case must be judged individually, on its own
merits...irrespective of stupid conventionalities...
I mean, each woman's right to her liberty-- " He pulled himself up, startled by the
turn his thoughts had taken, and went on, looking at her with a smile: "Since you
understand so many things, dearest, can't
you go a little farther, and understand the uselessness of our submitting to another
form of the same foolish conventionalities?
If there's no one and nothing between us, isn't that an argument for marrying
quickly, rather than for more delay?"
She flushed with joy and lifted her face to his; as he bent to it he saw that her eyes
were full of happy tears.
But in another moment she seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to
helpless and timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative
were all for others, and that she had none for herself.
It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied
composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back
into the usual, as a too-adventurous child takes refuge in its mother's arms.
Archer had no heart to go on pleading with her; he was too much disappointed at the
vanishing of the new being who had cast that one deep look at him from her
transparent eyes.
May seemed to be aware of his disappointment, but without knowing how to
alleviate it; and they stood up and walked silently home.
>